Forged of Shadows: A Novel of the Marked Souls by Jessa Slade

be here.” The tremble in her voice made him pause.
    She didn’t mean to state the obvious, he understood. She was asking him whether it would have been better to die. In the face of her vulnerability, having nothing to do with her nakedness, his demon quieted, and he foundered in the sudden loss of its bracing fury. “You couldn’t save your sister, or yourself at that moment, but what you will become now may help us save the world.”
    From the flicker across her face, he knew he had not said the right thing. But it was only the truth, or the only truth he had anyway.
    “That is all I can offer,” he said softly to the unspoken disillusionment in her eyes.
    “I guess that’s more than I had before.”
    A gray shadow like encroaching ice rimed her gaze. He felt the chill on her skin. “No. Whatever sorrow started you down this path, you cannot return there. You strive forward or your soul is forfeit.”
    He flattened his hand in the small of her back and raised her up against him. Her dark nipples were a lure he could not resist. He skimmed off her shirt and loose bra in the same motion as he dipped his head so that her gasp of surprise filled his mouth with her warm flesh.
    But she was no quiet lover to let him feast in peace. Her hands roamed from his shoulders to his flanks, her nails raising shivers from his bones.
    When she fumbled down his fly, a chill of caution swept in along with the breath of air on his cock. He lifted himself awkwardly on the angles of the couch to stare down at her.
    She must have seen the hesitation in his eyes because she clamped her hands on his hips. “I won’t let this thing take me to the dark place. I told myself I’d never let anyone do that to me again.”
    He wanted to smash all those unnamed anyones whose inflicted hurts had so toughened her. Regret that he was her only choice—her only chance—swept him. As league leader, he had failed her already. But he’d told her their only way out led forward. Outside, the day had faded, and in the gloom, her skin flushed with restless demon ethers he sensed more than saw. He had to channel that confusion of power until she could control it herself. He could give her that, at least. Then she’d be free of him, if not of her demon.
    Deliberately echoing the pattern of her hands over his body, as if he could re-create the ancient meditations that had once guided the league possessed through ascension, he unbuckled her belt and slid the denim down the width of her hips, the generous arch of her backside.
    Even the light dance of her hands threatened to unbalance him, so he slid free of her touch, dropping kisses along each inch he uncovered, from her navel, across the matching red and orange panties, down her thigh to her raised knee. She had barely finished fumbling with the laces on her big black boots when he yanked away the whole tangle of denim and lacy underwear and leather and fell back on her, afraid to let her go.
    Because now he sensed it too, the yawning of the abyss, hell as close as it ever came, as her demon ascended and other-realm mists breathed around them.
    He said it aloud, for anything listening. “I won’t let you go.”
    “How will you get your pants off?”
    “You started this.”
    Then his jeans were somewhere in the pile with hers. His knees drove into the couch cushions, rocking her toward him as he centered himself between her thighs.
    “Now,” she said.
    “No.” He anchored her hips by the double handful. “Take it slow.”
    “Why?”
    What to say? Because he needed a moment to remember how this went? He didn’t want her to laugh. Because he feared no such chance would come to him again, and he wanted to savor every feeling? That thought revealed even more vulnerability than the first.
    Rather than speak, he smoothed his erection over her cleft. That silenced her, and widened her eyes so the cinnamon-honey gleam eclipsed the creeping icy gray. When she gripped his shoulders, the force of her